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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

Terry Eagleton

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Terry Eagleton
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 22
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Theorist
Non-Fiction Writer
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
May
Barricades
React
Masses
Novels
Throwing
Thrown
Mass
Novel

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Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
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Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
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Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
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Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
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The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
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A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
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The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
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The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
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The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
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For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
Terry Eagleton
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
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To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
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It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
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